AT&T Launches Personalized Radio from Pandora

AT&T Wireless Customers Can Now Discover New Music and Listen to Favorite Artists Through a Personalized Radio Station

San Antonio, Texas.-AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) today announced that Pandora, the popular and rapidly growing Internet radio service, is now available on select wireless phones from AT&T. With Pandora, AT&T’s wireless customers can discover new music, listen to their favorite artists and create their own personalized radio stations on their handsets.

Pandora makes listening to favorite music and discovering new music simple and fun. Users just type in a song or artist that they like, and, within seconds, Pandora delivers a personalized radio station over the air to wireless customers’ handsets with songs that fit the same sound and style. The songs are selected based on the Music Genome Project, Pandora’s innovative system that uses highly trained musicians to analyze music one song at a time. These musicians identify hundreds of different musical qualities of each recording, including melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, arrangement, lyrics and vocals. Using this analysis, the listener’s personalized radio stations are created. Listeners can then rate the songs that they hear with a simple “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to further refine the stations’ playlist to their tastes.

“Pandora allows our customers to access their customized radio stations wherever they are without the need to carry an extra device, and that provides the ultimate convenience,” said Mark Collins, vice president of Consumer Data for AT&T’s wireless unit. “Pandora’s unique approach to radio, combined with AT&T’s already robust mobile music platform, supports consumer demand for more wireless music offerings. This service is another example of the many innovative ways that AT&T connects our customers to more of the music they want at the moment they want it.”

“Pandora is a great way to discover new music that you may have never found otherwise,” said Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora. “Now, listeners can have personalized music throughout the day — with the stations that they created — whenever and wherever they want. With this launch, AT&T and Pandora are continuing the ongoing expansion of Internet radio across all forms of listening.”

With Pandora, users can explore as much as they want. The Music Genome Project quickly scans its entire collection of analyzed music — almost a century’s worth of popular recordings, from new to old, well-known to obscure — to find songs with musical attributes similar to the listener’s choice. Then, it creates a listening experience full of current and soon-to-be favorite songs. Subscribers can create and refine up to 100 unique stations.

Pandora on AT&T phones is integrated seamlessly with the online version of Pandora. Subscribers will receive customized streaming radio stations delivered to them on both their mobile handsets and on the Pandora Web site via a universal account. With the ability to customize radio stations on their phone as well as on their PC, users will receive a very personalized radio experience that fits their individual needs. Up to 100 stations can be saved in a user’s account, and those stations can be enjoyed anywhere within AT&T’s extensive 3G network.

Information about the current song, including title, artist and album, is displayed on the phone’s screen, and customers can also scroll backward to see information about recently played songs. Customers can rate songs with either a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down,” and Pandora will immediately tweak the station’s programming. Users can pause songs or skip songs that they don’t want to hear. Additionally, AT&T customers can bookmark a song, and the song name and artist will be saved. The bookmark can serve as a reminder to purchase the song later on the AT&T Mobile Music Store.

Pandora is now available on eight AT&T phones: the Samsung SYNC, a717 and a737, the Motorola V3xx and RAZR 2, LG trax and existing LG CU400 and CU405 models. To access, users simply click the music icon on the device and then shop applications.

Pandora is available for a free trial for the first five days and then costs $8.99 a month. AT&T recommends selecting a MEdia Max bundle, which not only provides unlimited mobile Web-browsing with MEdia Net but also unlimited access to streaming video, CV and basic content. The MEdia Max bundle is $19.99 a month and includes 200 text messages.

The new service complements AT&T’s existing Mobile Music experience, which is the richest and most complete mobile music offering in the industry. AT&T Mobile Music enables customers to choose how they want to discover and listen to music — whether via instantaneous downloading or via sideloading from popular music subscription services, such as Napster and eMusic. Other AT&T Mobile Music offerings include satellite radio with XM Radio, a song-recognition service called MusicID and a vast ringtone library. AT&T was the only U.S. carrier to offer a phone with iTunes capability in 2005 and launched the Apple iPhone in June of this year. Customers can find AT&T’s Mobile Music offerings by clicking on the music icon on their music phones.